I presume these turrets are not going to be immortal in the final design? If so, another option (not as straightforward perhaps?) is to have your turrets use their iR sensor that's used for recording hits to decode an iR beacon LED on each tank which broadcasts a friend/foe or team iD?

"There is no problem so bad you can't make it worse"- retired astronaut Chris Hadfield

To add an element of strategy, I used the repair robots to enable/disable the tower. Previously the repair pulse only fixed vehicles, but now the tower will respond to a repair pulse by stopping its scan and firing.

Another possible future option would be for a repair robot to repair a disabled enemy unit and "claim" it for the friendly side.

Note: I hacked up this rumble robot pretty bad. The problem ended up being old AA batteries. It needed fresh ones. The way their motors are geared, they don't behave well with marginal batteries. I ended up adding a TIP120 (NPN transistor) to the arm movement because I couldn't find the pin that controlled them. If anyone knows where this pin is located, please send me a .jpg...thanks.

Most people place their rumble robot controller in the head, but this requires that the arm motors be removed. I kind of liked the arm motion, so I had to place my controller on the outside of the robot...Not very pretty, but the arm motion is cute for simulating the repairing of the vehicle.

Ultrasonic sensors have a range of about 3 feet. I suppose that there is a potential for the transmission of one to be received as an echo by another, but I'm not sure if internal hardware may discount it (as the value would be higher than a normal echo). Its a fair question and honestly I haven't created enough sensors to be able to test for this.

Which brings up another point that I am just starting to grasp. An IR battlefield is composed of mobile units and static models and static interactive units. I have been focused on the mobile units, but truly the larger effort is creating the Battlefield complete with models of cities, farmlands, terrain and static units. To create a quality battlefield is at least as time/money consuming as creating a quality G-Scale train layout. This hasn't necessarily discouraged me from continuing but it has given me a better grasp of what I want to create.

Any particular model that you would like to see gears/motors? I have a bunch of Heng Long 1/16, no Tamiyas. The GI Joe tanks I've actually had trouble with the gears and need some help to refurbish them.

You know what would be cool?...Take a wifi camera that has pan/tilt, and hack the pan/tilt to control the movement of the tank. I have a wanscam that I am trying to get to work...Anybody read chinese?

I have only one Huan Qi Tank, model 516-10 and green color and 40MHz, I could not find the yellow one yet and I'm working on a arduino bot to fight with green.

I made arduino tank using chassis from another tank, it is controlled by bluetooth and I added an IR emitter and receiver. I found on your library the code for barrel shot (huanQiPulses[] = {12500, 600, 2150, 600, 700, 1950, 600, 8500};) and now my arduino tank can fire against green tank with barrel XD. Thank you for it.

Machine gun is very similar. I'm glad you liked it. I'll have to check my library, or do quick check. I have a library for hacking an ir pulse. That may be useful as well. Can you point me to how you did the Bluetooth control. I have a Bluetooth shield but I'm not sure if you need a master or a slave.ThanksPaul

My problema was know the pulses that green tank recognizes as barrel and machine-gun (from the yellow tank, that I not have). Thanks to you I have the barrel and I will be very happy if you can hack (dump) machine-gun pulses from your 27MHz yellow tank.